Jefferson Bible Sparks Religion Debate in America

Jerome Socolovsky

May 01, 2013

WASHINGTON — America's founding fathers broke with the tradition of state-sponsored religion when they separated church and state in the new republic. But religion continues to divide Americans, and one of the key disagreements is over what the early leaders themselves believed.

In the final years of his life, former U.S. President Thomas Jefferson took a knife and cut up the Gospels, holy scripture to Christians

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Earlier this year, Luis Granados of the American Humanist Association published a version and sent it to lawmakers.

"There's some great wisdom in there, and we think members of Congress would be well advised to spend a few hours sitting around thinking about that - and at the same time well advised to recognize that there's some other stuff in there that's maybe not so good," he said.